How Animals Grieve (9 page)

Long-term Amboseli elephant researcher Cynthia Moss depicts the relationship scheme of modern elephants as a concentric circle: females and their young occupy the center. In the next ring are other female relatives, like sisters and grandmothers. In the outer rings are the males, first the younger ones, hovering on the verge of independence, and finally the mature roaming bulls.

When family members who have been separated by their divergent travels come together again, their reunion is a virtual choreography
of
joy. The elephants intertwine their floppy trunks, click their tusks together, and flap their ears. Out may gush fountains of urine. Sometimes the bulky bodies spin around and individuals back into each other. Throughout this period, which may last as long as ten minutes, there’s vocal accompaniment: rumbles, screams, and trumpets.

On joy’s flip side, we enter the territory of grief. Douglas-Hamilton’s team recorded a startling event in 2003 centered on the elephant Eleanor, matriarch of a family called the First Ladies. Well-known to the research team, Eleanor had been seen 106 times over the years. About five and a half months before the incident I’m about to describe, she had given birth. Her calf, a female, was doing fine. Maya, an elephant who had been seen 101 times, was Eleanor’s closest companion, and the researchers strongly suspected that she was Eleanor’s daughter.

On the early evening of October 10, Eleanor was seen dragging her swollen trunk on the ground. One ear and one leg appeared bruised. As Douglas-Hamilton and his coworkers later reported, she took a “few slow small steps” and then was seen to be “falling heavily to the ground.” Two minutes later, Grace, matriarch of a family called the Virtues, approached. Using her trunk and one foot, she explored Eleanor’s body. Grace then used her tusks to lift Eleanor back onto her feet. Too weak to stay upright, Eleanor collapsed again when Grace pushed her and urged her to walk.

Grace must have understood something of Eleanor’s dire physical state, because she exhibited extreme distress as she came to Eleanor’s aid, vocalizing and continuing to push Eleanor with her tusks. Even when the rest of her family moved on, Grace stayed put for at least another hour, right at Eleanor’s side. At this point, Maya, the presumed daughter, was far away and could have had no idea that Eleanor was down. In fact, Eleanor never got to her feet again. She died the next morning.

From radio-tracking we know that on the second day, Maya came within ten meters of Eleanor. But it was an elephant called Maui, from a family known as the Hawaiian Islands, who showed a keen response to Eleanor’s body. She extended her trunk, sniffed and touched the body, then put her trunk into her mouth to taste it. With her right foot, Maui
hovered
over Eleanor; she nudged her and pulled the body with her left foot and trunk. I assume she was trying to right Eleanor, as Grace had the day before. Then Maui did something different: she stood over the body and rocked back and forth. Together these actions lasted for eight minutes.

For a full week after Eleanor’s death, elephants came to the body in a parade of exploration and emotion. On day three, the park rangers cut the tusks from Eleanor’s body, an act that must have been designed to thwart ivory poachers. From that point forward, what remained was a severely disfigured elephant body. Eleanor’s trunk was severed, and where the tusks normally would be were only open holes.

On this same day, Grace returned to Eleanor. This time, she made no move to lift the fallen elephant; she only stood quietly by the body. Maya and other members of Eleanor’s family came near. They didn’t, as far as I can tell from the reports, touch their matriarch’s body—with one exception. Eleanor’s young daughter, the new calf, nuzzled her mother. She seemed disoriented, trying to suck from other young calves, then returning to the body of her mother.

Ultimately, this calf was not to survive. Though she was seen in subsequent weeks attempting to suckle from other breeding females in her mother’s group, none of those elephants obliged her—and she was too young and vulnerable to survive without milk. But on day three, the calf seemed only to want to be near her lifeless mother. When an unrelated family named Biblical Towns approached, its members pushed away the First Ladies—that is, Eleanor’s kin—in what appeared to be a combination of dominance bid and desire to explore the dead body. Only Eleanor’s calf was not pushed aside. A photograph shows her standing next to her mother, alone, near to a group of large and imposing elephants who were not her kin. The baby’s stiff posture, and slightly extended trunk, makes a poignant image.

Over the next four days, Maya and other members of the First Ladies family spent some time near Eleanor’s body and some time away. By the fourth day, the carcass had become a scavengers’ feast: jackals, hyenas, vultures, and lions all ate from it. On the sixth day, a female called Sage, from the family Spice Girls, approached the body. Even at this point—
with
her tusks missing and her carcass partially consumed—Eleanor evoked a response. Sage spent three minutes sniffing and touching the body with her trunk.

At no time during the week following Eleanor’s death did a bull visit the carcass. The responses came from females, but not only from Eleanor’s female kin. Five elephant families demonstrated a distinct interest in the body, including Eleanor’s own family. In their report, Douglas-Hamilton and his coauthors find it significant that elephants’ keen interest in dying and dead individuals is not limited by genetic relationship. “Elephants have a generalized response to suffering and death,” they conclude.

The study of elephants’ responses to Eleanor’s death lasted one week, but elephants almost surely remember their dead for much longer than that. If at Samburu, radio-tracking data supplement what we learn from observational work, at Amboseli, experimental trials that measure elephants’ responses offer a fresh perspective on how elephants respond to the dead.

I admit to a special fondness for the Amboseli elephant research. For one thing, there are twenty-two hundred elephants individually known at Amboseli—if I found the nine hundred at Samburu impressive, let’s just say I’m knocked out by this higher figure and the intensive labor by elephant scientists that it represents. Also, Amboseli is where I spent fourteen months baboon-watching, and where I had the incomparable experience of observing elephants who lumbered right into my backyard. Moss’s elephants (as I think of them) ventured surprisingly close to the Amboseli Baboon Project’s thatched adobe house, where I lived. At night, through my bedroom’s open-mesh window, I heard the push of their great bodies moving slowly through the vegetation. During the day, I viewed them silhouetted against snow-laden Mount Kilimanjaro, which loomed large across the Tanzanian border. Though my beat is primates and I have never formally studied the Amboseli elephants, my casual encounters with them at my house and in the field were unforgettable.

The idea that Amboseli elephants seek out the bones of their deceased loved ones to caress seemed marvelous to me; it wrapped up elephant smartness and elephant emotion into one package. I reported to others that elephants distinguish the bones of their dead relatives from those of
other
elephants in their habitat, and behave differently toward the bones of their kin. It’s not that this information is downright false or mythical. It’s not on a par with the popular but apocryphal idea of an elephant graveyard. (Elephants do not travel purposefully to a single place to die. They may travel toward water and end up dying in clusters near water with more than random regularity, or they may, sadly, be shot by humans in such numbers that their strewn carcasses resemble a graveyard.) In fact, I got the idea that elephants seek out the bones of dead relatives from Cynthia Moss herself.

In her book
Elephant Memories
, Moss tells a story of bringing back to camp the jaw of an elephant matriarch who had died a few weeks earlier. Three days later, the elephant’s family passed near the camp. When they smelled the jaw, they diverted their course to approach it. When the family finished its inspection and moved on, one elephant stayed behind. The dead female’s seven-year-old son continued to stroke the jaw and turn it with his foot and trunk. Moss felt certain that the young male somehow recognized his mother.

Other Amboseli elephants’ response to the bones of a relative—their matriarch—was captured on film. A small group of elephants encircles the bones on the ground. Some elephants begin to turn the bones over and pick them up in their trunks, feeling their nooks, crannies, and crevices. It’s the detailed exploration of the bones that is so striking—all while the elephants, at least some of them, vocalize. Then, with the bones on the ground again, the elephants touch them with their back feet.

It’s common enough for Amboseli elephants to caress bleached bones that they come across in their travels. But does the exploration of the bones recorded in this film (and that described by other elephant researchers) equate to grief, as the narrator suggests? Might the strength of an elephant’s response to bleached-white bones somehow correlate with her degree of kinship with the dead elephant? It sounds plausible, since we know that elephant relatives bond deeply with each other, that elephants have enduring memories, and that elephants grieve. Is it so strange to think that elephants are able to identify the bones of loved ones who have died some time before and visit them in order to pay homage?

Karen
McComb, Lucy Baker, and Cynthia Moss have attacked these questions experimentally at Amboseli, in a superb example of how science works. The three scientists set about rigorously following up on an impression Moss had gained from her casual observations of relatives’ responses to the bones of the dead. The research questions were these: Are elephants more attracted to skulls and ivory from elephants than to other objects? Do they show more interest in elephant skulls than in skulls of other large mammals? Do they prefer to investigate the skulls of relatives over the skulls of other elephants? Yes, yes, and no are the answers, according to the experimental data. Elephants care very much about their own species’ bones compared to other objects or the bones of other species, but show no evidence of preferring the skulls of their own kin to the skulls of other elephants.

First, McComb and her coworkers presented a piece of ivory, a piece of wood, and an elephant skull to an array of elephant families (one family at a time). The arrangement of the objects was carefully controlled, with different objects in the rightmost, center, and leftmost positions from trial to trial. The elephants’ behavioral responses were videotaped, with particular attention given in the analysis phase to the length of time an elephant spent exploring an object with trunk or feet. Of the three objects, elephants preferred the ivory. The skull was next, and the wood came in last. Since the skull is, of course, invisible during an animal’s life, I wonder if the ivory was preferred because the elephants more readily recognized it as belonging to a particular individual, perhaps through a scar, chip, or discolored area. The researchers hint at this possibility by noting the ivory’s connection with living elephants.

Next, three skulls, one each from an elephant, a buffalo, and a rhino, were arrayed in front of elephant families. The elephants distinctly preferred the skull of their own kind, with a lesser but equal attraction to skulls from the other two species. The third part of the research involved three elephant families, each of which had lost its matriarch in the past one to five years. The surviving elephants were presented with the skulls of the three matriarchs, only one of whom, of course, had been their own group’s matriarch. The elephants showed no greater interest in the skull of their own matriarch.

What, then, is the meaning of the anecdote Moss reported, about the
seven-
year-old son caressing his mother’s bones? Do the experimental results negate the emotion the son seemed to express as he lingered over the remains of his mother, or the suggestion that elephants more generally may mourn their loved ones by caressing the bones? I think the answer to that last question is no. When anecdotes are reported by scientists or others who cautiously interpret the behavior of animals they know well, they point to an animal’s capacity to carry out some action or express some emotion. Even if only some elephants grieve for a lost relative or friend, even if only some elephants caress the bones of their dead relatives, that behavior is genuine, and meaningful, for those individuals.

When it comes to animal emotion, today’s animal-behavior science tacks back and forth between analysis of events noted by credible observers and evidence derived from controlled experiments (which, as the Amboseli researchers show us, can take place in the field as well as in captivity). These two sources are complementary. The events reported may be rare but hint at unsuspected possibilities and emotional depth in the animals’ behavior; the controlled evidence requires us to put the brakes on reckless speculation about those alluring possibilities. The experiment by McComb, Baker, and Moss constrains wild statements to the effect that elephants (implying all elephants) recognize and prefer the bones of their dead relatives, and this in turn constrains speculation about the way elephants (implying all elephants) mourn.

The McComb study tells us that elephants are keenly intrigued by the bones of their own kind. In day-to-day life, this tendency surely means that they are attracted to, and that they interact with, bones of their kin (as well as bones of non-kin). How readily elephants recognize their own kins’ bones and mourn the individuals represented by those bones remains a mystery.

Once, the Echo family of elephants in Amboseli came upon a carcass of a young female who had been sick for a number of weeks. That the elephants explored the carcass comes as no surprise, but they went on to do something remarkable. As Moss watched, the elephants

began to kick at the ground around the carcass, digging up the dirt and putting it on the body. A few others broke off branches and palm fronds
and
brought them back and placed them on the carcass. At that point the warden circled overhead and dived down in his plane to guide the rangers on the ground to the dead elephant so that they could recover the tusks. The [elephants] were frightened by the plane and ran off. I think if they had not been disturbed they would have nearly buried the body.